Quote of the Day (Nick Pinkerton, on ‘Dodgy’ Investing in Films)

“The [movie] business is, and has always been, a dodgy boondoggle; not for nothing were the old-money WASPs at the East Coast banks reticent to put capital behind fledgling Hollywood. When [American film director Abel] Ferrara was starting out, private investment in low-budget films was spurred by tax loopholes, a way for doctors, dentists, and racketeers to get rid of extra cash that would otherwise wind up in Uncle Sam’s grubby mitts. Fortunes could be made, even if they rarely wound up in the hands of the ‘talent,’ and were made just often enough to keep alive financiers’ delusions of having money down on what could be the next sleeper hit…a situation that can’t be said to persist today, when persuading someone to back an independent film is essentially a matter of finding a credulous dupe to give you a pile of cash to set fire to. In terms of its risk-to-reward ratio, investing in an independent film ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of accepting the hand of a Nigerian prince who has introduced himself to you via cold email. To be a successful independent filmmaker—that is, one who is even sporadically employed—is, in essence, to be a bit of a con man.”— American film critics, screenwriter, and editor Nick Pinkerton, “A Rake’s Progress” (review of Abel Ferrara’s memoir Scene), Harper’s Magazine, November 2025

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on ‘The Writer’s First Job’)

“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”— American critic, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag (1933-2004), “In Jerusalem,” The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2001

TV Quote of the Day (‘Veep,’ on Executive Branch Overspending)

Selina Meyer [played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] [berating aide Gary for overspending on a state dinner on her behalf]: “Who do you think you are? Gary Antoinette?!” —Veep, Season 4, Episode 2, “East Wing,” original air date Apr. 19, 2015, teleplay by Kevin Cecil, Roger Drew, and Andy Riley, directed by Stephanie Laing

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Life, ‘A Gamble’)

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” —Czech-born English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)

TV Quote of the Day (Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, on How ‘The Higher Life of Man is God’)

“The higher life of man is God. And if man is ever to be lifted up, God in some way must come down to man.”—Venerable Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), Life Is Worth Living, Season 4, Episode 112, “The True Meaning of Christmas,” original air date 1956

Quote of the Day (Geoffrey Parker, on the Importance of French Historian Fernand Braudel)

“The Mediterranean refashioned the entire framework of history. It showed that geography, climate, and distance—what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie would later call ‘l’histoire immobile’—formed the essential context without which history makes no sense. The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964. I had never considered those self-evident truths.”— Geoffrey Parker, Professor of European History at the Ohio State University, “The Transformations of Fernand Braudel,” History Today, November 2025

Forty years ago this week, French historian Fernand Braudel died at age 83. He is associated with the Annales School, an influential movement in historical writing that moved beyond the “great man” school of narrative writing to consider how material factors like water, famine, wildlife, diets, disease, trade, and violence affected ordinary people—including those he grew up with.

Braudel began working on the history that made his reputation, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, under the most extraordinary circumstances: as a prisoner of war during World War II, without access to libraries or any written records, relying initially on his great memory. In old age he produced a three-volume survey of the 15^th through 18^th centuries, Civilization and Capitalism, the capstone of his effort to create a sweeping “history from below.”

(For an excellent overview of Braudel and the Annales School, please see Daniel Halverson’s February 2016 post on the blog “The Partially Examined Life.”)